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POLL: Fedora updates - conservative or adventurous?

Those of you who read the development mailing list (you poor, poor people) may have noticed this week's egregious bitchfest^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Henthusiastic discussion on the topic of Fedora's update strategy.

Because I'm an experienced poop-stirrer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinterested in the views of users, I thought "hey, what this thread REALLY needs is a highly unscientific forum poll!"

So, here it is. Which update strategy do you prefer - conservative or adventurous? EDIT: just to be totally clear, this is about stable releases - what kind of updates do you want for a given Fedora release after it comes out. Here's some definitions:

conservative - usually defined as updates being pushed only to fix security issues and specific, serious bugs. New versions of software are not pushed as updates as a matter of course.

adventurous - new versions of software are pushed as updates, along with security fixes when no new version is available. Particularly disruptive updates are not pushed, being held for the next release instead.

At present, Fedora uses a mixture of both. Fr'instance, the GNOME team follows the conservative path (if Fedora 12 comes out with GNOME 2.28, you don't get GNOME 2.30 as an update), while the KDE team follows the adventurous path (they do ship new major KDE versions as updates).

Some of the proposals under discussion would essentially provide both paths, but what I'm interested in with this poll is which of the two paths you personally prefer, so if you would prefer the distribution to implement a system giving users a choice, just vote for whichever option you'd choose in that case.

Adventurous! Updates have almost never broken anything for me, and when they have it's been minor with a fix waiting on this forum. On the other hand, updates often fix things. One day I updated Rhythmbox and cover art appeared on my Ipod where it hadn't before. It was like Christmas .

Well, I would have pressed the button "in the middle" of the poll choices. You know, that "somewhere between conservative and adventurous" button.

I like that Fedora keeps up somewhat fairly well with current releases of software, but I am definitely not one of those "gotta have the latest version, of whatever, just because, well, it's the latest version" people.

I like updating to software that works. If that means a package spending a little more time in updates-testing before being pushed into updates, that's just fine with me. To err is human, but it's got to be more than a little embarrassing to a package maintainer to push a package into updates that won't even launch (a recent update of Sunbird comes to mind). Bet it never saw one second in updates-testing and the package builder never bothered to install and run it on his/her own system first. Arhg!

Especially since I have slow dial-up, I get all "grrrrrrrry" when I update a package or packages only to have to update the same package(s) within a day or two 'cuz someone goofed. Fingers are pointing more at the RPM Fusion package maintainers here than at Fedora on this gripe. There's been a rash of this coming from RPM Fusion repos lately.

So, if I had to pick between the two poll choices, I guess it'd be "conservative".

To me Fedora should = Adventurous . Isn't that the whole idea behind Fedora? Although, it would be nice to be adventurous for packages that are downgradeable and conservative with packages that are not downgradeable but that may be a different barrel of monkeys altogether.

Either way of updating can be the wrong way or the the correct way depending on what the programs inside the package is doing and how much you understand Fedora (Linux) to recover from a situation.

But in general, if one is conservative in updating, they would be constantly fighting bugs and broken conditions, the same exact things that too aggressive updating creates, but with a known fallback path (yesterdays updates) or just a waiting period (try again tomorrow.)

It really isn't about one's personality, it's about knowledge of what one is doing.
This overall base knowledge takes years to collect.
So in a nutshell, those that get Fedora update and those switching over from the Disney Channel don't have a clue.

I consider it's best for Fedora to take de adventurous path and although I use a mixture of both sometimes, that's the approach I preffer because it drives innovation.

For example I like the fact that thanks to Fedora's adventurous approach, new hardware is supported faster; on the other hand if I happen to know in advance about a major issue with an upcoming update (like wifi being killed) I switch myself to the conservative approach by reducing the updates.

bob: er, I should note that the poll is about the updates in *stable* releases, not the way rawhide development should be approached. obviously it wouldn't be appropriate for rawhide to be 'conservative'.

Those of you who read the development mailing list (you poor, poor people) may have noticed this week's egregious bitchfest^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Henthusiastic discussion on the topic of Fedora's update strategy.

Because I'm an experienced poop-stirrer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinterested in the views of users, I thought "hey, what this thread REALLY needs is a highly unscientific forum poll!"

So, here it is. Which update strategy do you prefer - conservative or adventurous? EDIT: just to be totally clear, this is about stable releases - what kind of updates do you want for a given Fedora release after it comes out. Here's some definitions:

conservative - usually defined as updates being pushed only to fix security issues and specific, serious bugs. New versions of software are not pushed as updates as a matter of course.

adventurous - new versions of software are pushed as updates, along with security fixes when no new version is available. Particularly disruptive updates are not pushed, being held for the next release instead.

At present, Fedora uses a mixture of both. Fr'instance, the GNOME team follows the conservative path (if Fedora 12 comes out with GNOME 2.28, you don't get GNOME 2.30 as an update), while the KDE team follows the adventurous path (they do ship new major KDE versions as updates).

Some of the proposals under discussion would essentially provide both paths, but what I'm interested in with this poll is which of the two paths you personally prefer, so if you would prefer the distribution to implement a system giving users a choice, just vote for whichever option you'd choose in that case.

My desktop I want to go the adventurous route. My server in the closet I want to be a little more conservative. Then again the server runs headless so if it falls down and can't get up it is a whole production to get it out of the closet etc. If it was close to a monitor and keyboard I would probably be feeling a little more risque about it. The gnome folks are pussies.